The electric motor really doesn't change the difficulty of flying. In a small training aircraft, engine management is a very minor part of the workload.

Even daytime VFR flight rules in the US require 30 minutes of fuel beyond your expected destination. So the 45 minutes to 1 hour turns into 15-30 minutes of usable flight time. At 100mph cruise, and counting the extra fuel burn for climb, it probably has a 30 mile useful range.

BTW - why ducted fans? For low subsonic speeds, unducted props are more efficient, thats why they are used on virtually every low subsonic aircraft. (everything from a piper cub to a commercial twin-turboprop. There are some nice features that they list, but giving up efficiency on such a marginal aircraft seems like pure marketing.

They say 2 seats, but what is the useful load? Can it carry 2 standard adults and their usual flying gear?

And the mechanical properties, like yield strength, and modulus in some useful units like psi or Pascalls or something, not comparing it to "bone". At one point they say 1/3 the strength of steel, but steel varies by huge amounts depending on the alloy. And was that number with reinforcement or not??

Otherwise its:
we have a new plastic. We won't tell you what it is or what its properties are, except that its thermosetting (like a million other plastics) and it doesn't survive mildly acidic water.

Without trying to predict what Snowdon would have done in that situation, I think the mistake the NSA made was in thinking that even the foreign intelligence part of this could have been kept secret indefinitely. The Dr Strangelove quote of "you can't fault the entire system because of a single screw-up" is really appropriate. Knowledge of this program was so damaging to US business interests that the risk of an information release was too high.

Snowdon may have acted out of (misplaced or not) morality, but when you have a secret that could move many billions of dollars from US to foreign industries, some people would have purely financial motivations to see that it was leaked.

The job of the NSA is spying on foreign governments, I have no particular problem with that . The problem is that they did so in a way that substantially destroyed faith in US industry if / when it was discovered. All of the arguments the US government has made against using Chinese networking hardware now reflect back. If we try to claim that "everyone does it", then people will go with the cheapest vendor, and that isn't US.

The NSA did something that if revealed would badly damage US industry. The NSA then failed to properly protect that data. Snowdon is irrelevant - with such devastating information, any proper security system had to take into account that an employee might try to release it for any of a wide variety of reasons, rational or not.

The problem is that even if this is a lie, the NSA has done enough that it will likely be believed. Once some lines have been crossed, its difficult to claim that others have not been. There are lots of companies with a huge financial interest in damaging the reputation of US equipment, so one can expect a constant flow of stories - some true some not.

Yes the NSA has done grave damage to US tech industry. They likely have also drastically weakened our national defense by creating / allowing / obscuring weaknesses in our cyber defense. I don't think it was intentional, just people applying 20th century ideas to 21st century conflicts. The sort of thinking that causes great nations to become quaint has-been's.

Fair enough. I'm happy to count kinetic and potential energy, and them by my definition you are in space.

If you argue that then sitting on Mercury isn't "space", I'll point out that you will have to have been in "space" to have gotten there.

I agree that its nothing like going to orbit and doesn't really advance technology.

Its just a stunt, but if people want to pay for it, I'm OK with them wasting their money. A few hours in a Mig 29 sounds like more fun though.

A reasonable definition of space would be based on orbital velocity, not location. Virgin galactic is selling a few minutes of zero-g, similar to, but considerably longer (and much more expensive) than the commercial vomit-comet flights. You could do something similar by dropping a capsule from a high altitude balloon.

Its true that they are in an area of very low air pressure, but that isn't particularly interesting to passenger .

Its fine if people want to pay for this, and if calling it "space" will give them bragging rights, its OK with me. It isn't really space travel.

The only reason I care is that this can confuse the general public into thinking that say Space-X and Virgin Galactic are doing anything remotely comparable, or thinking that an orbital virgin -galactic upgrade is a minor change, not a completely new and spectacularly more difficult problem.

Wish I had points to mod parent further up.

Yes, IT infrastructure is complex. So is electrical, HVAC, plumbing. As with those jobs, some of the work is simple maintenance that can be done by almost anyone who has received the proper training, some requires large amounts of experience or talent or both.

The relative complexity of the systems depends on the installation. For some engineering firms, the IT infrastructure may be quite complex relative to the other systems. For some industrial applications (like chip fabs), the environmental control may be extremely complex.

I'm not saying this to diminish IT, it does require excellent people who put in a lot of effort. Its just that other infrastructure support also requires very skilled people, they just happen to have to literally get their hands dirty.

The idea is to use solar to charge an electric car. OK, might work in some locations for some use cases, but hardly innovative. They had a architect design a support for the solar panels that some people may think is aesthetically pleasing. OK, but again not exciting. They want carbon fiber and bamboo. Again OK, but it could have been recycled plastic, or old aluminum cans, or adobe or pick your favorite "green" material of the day.

Why is this slashdot worthy? (except as an ad for BMW)

note the "may".
I completely agree, we may contact aliens in the next 50-100 years. The probability isn't zero.

The government does a lot of things that private industry does not do - generally things for which the economic incentive model can't work, or where we are not looking for the economic optimum.

As an example, look at basic science R&D. A commercial company generally won't to basic science because the value of the results is in their very wide scale applicability and that is very difficult to monetize.

A free market education system would probably not bother to educate the least capable 20% of students, but there is a belief that we want to provide an opportunity for education for everyone.

There really is no way to know what is real and what isn't with propaganda machines going full out on both sides.

Considering that investment firms cost the government HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in bailouts, can they really argue that porn stars are "risky"?

I don't think the tools are well known. For instance I didn't know I could get at my google info.

A more serious problem is the lack of trust. There is a concern that you will only be able to add information, not remove it, and your spam levels will just increase. (this may not be true, but its a valid concern).